The Institution of Philosophy (4)
Cohen, Avner; Dascal, Marcelo; eds. The Institution of Philosophy: A Discipline in Crisis? La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989.
Joseph Margolis, “Radical Philosophy and Radical History,” pp. 249-270.
Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Derrida may have wanted to put an end to traditional philosophy, but at most they provided self-corrective measures, not the therapies they though they had, as did Quine, and Carnap and Hume before him, in another line of development. Quine cannot justify his extensionalism; it becomes another dogma. Is there a basis for convergence of the analytical and continental streams? (256) Here there is a question of first-order of second-order arguments, of naturalization and historization. More about Rorty, Rorty on Quine and others . . . How could Rorty have failed to draw these conclusions:
(a’) the achievements of science supports a minimal realism of some kind; (b’) there are no rationally sustained first-order inquiries without seond-order (legitimating) inquiries; and (c’) consistent with our therapeutic finding, both first- and second-order inquiries can and must be pursued without appeal to privilege or transparency. (263)
Neither Quine nor other paragons of analytical philosophy have adequately pursued the consequences of inquiry “under the condition of historicized nature of human existence.” But this “is very nearly the life’s blood of contemporary phenomenology, Marxism, revived Hegelianism, Frankfurt Critical theory, hermeneutics, semiotics, even latter-day structuralism, even decconstruction.” (265) The convergence of analytical and continental comes from this: “what is largely implicit in the analytic is distinctly salient in the continental.” This is where the extensional and the intensional meet. (265) Margolis prophesies the union of Quine and Heidegger.
This, apparently, is the horizon of bourgeois philosophy at the end of the 20th century. I’m sure there are conclusions to be drawn from all this, but it is necessary to step outside these traditions and question their premises in order to sum up the lessons to be learned. There is something wrong-headed about the bases upon which these alleged traditions have proceeded over a century. The dead-ends of others should not be made our own.
Dascal’s own work under review is quite interesting, because it is historical. Whether he has something to offer for the future remains to be seen. This anthology is a disappointment. Rather than portending a rosy future, we see bourgeois thought grinding to a dead stop.
